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We kick off (un)making’s third season with an investigation into the theme of “movement,” with a conversation with artist and educator, Jesus Barraza. Through his many collaborations and community projects, particularly with his partner Melanie Cervantes and their work together under the banner Dignidad Rebelde, Jesus has helped to produce many of the political graphics and prints that continue to shape the visual identity for movements that are radical, feminist, and centered on people of color, in the San Francisco Bay Area and globally. Jesus roots this practice in struggles for social justice and in generations of creative knowledge, stories, and production. As he notes in the course of the interview, this work draws on a long and complex history of print, mural, and socially engaged practices within Indigenous and Xicanx communities—a constantly growing tradition that he now passes along to his students. We talk about Indigenous spiritualities, the community workshop as a cultural practice, and the ways Dignidad Rebelde’s political analysis has been shaped by Xicanisma and the Zapatistas.

Chicano art never really went out of style in California; it was born during the political foment of the 1960s and '70s, and it's bubbled along since then for decades. Now there's a new wave of the genre, one that's taken on a fiercer political edge since November.

Likewise, the work of Xicana and California activist Melanie Cervantes is exemplary printmaking, exploiting the power of the multiple to spread the message, and underscoring that message by means of vivid color and design. Her poster for EZLN, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Natcional, colloquially known as the Zapatistas, list their EZLN Women's Revolutionary Law (2010), which sounds like the basic tenets of a universal feminism if there could ever be one.

Barraza’s Solidarity with Standing Rock shows a confident young woman with her first raised just out of the poster frame. Behind her are scenes from the protests at Standing Rock Camp in eye-catching red and turquoise. Text at the bottom reads, simply: “Defend the land. Protect the water.”
While environmental science, predictive models, infrastructure, economics, water rights, treaties, human rights and individual values all rightfully complicate water politics, Barraza’s work points to the issue’s underlying simplicity, too easily forgotten.

Mar and Nestor interview Melanie Cervantes about her decade long work in philanthropy, her art collaboration called Dignidad Rebelde, and her favorite pan dulce! As artists and people working for social change, we want to dedicate this episode to the black lives we have lost recently, but also in the larger fight for freedom. May they rest in power!

Turning to the present, Dignidad Rebelde is an Oakland-based collaboration of Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes, which updates the aesthetic and political heritage of Emory Douglas. Influenced by his distinctive thick outlines and pattern/plain combinations, Dignidad Rebelde’s prints “translate people’s stories into art that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it.”
Although Dignidad Rebelde works with many social justice organizations, the most relevant in terms of radical imagination is Critical Resistance (CR), which ex-Panther Angela Davis co-founded in 1998. Understanding that shared beliefs give rise to reality, CR seeks “to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.” Stimulating new thoughts about security, CR’s radical vision of safety based on social justice is starting to displace the chains that clank through our public imaginaries.

This week’s #WCW Melanie Cervantes carries on a century-long tradition of Latina rebeldes using art to empower marginalized communities and translate their stories of struggle and resistance.
MORE: Woman Crush(ing the Patriarchy) Wednesday: Isa Noyola
The California Xicana co-founded Dignidad Rebelde, a graphic arts collaboration between her and Oakland-based artist Jesus Barraza, in 2007, acts as the senior program officer at the Akonadi Foundation, which supports organizations working to eliminate structural racism, and manages one of the most badass Latina feminist Instagram accounts on the social network.
Ahead, learn how this mujer crushes the Imperialist White Supremacist Cis Hetero Capitalist Patriarchy one screen print at a time.
What can you tell our readers about Dignidad Rebelde and why you felt the urgency to co-create it?
Initially, our interest in starting Dignidad Rebelde was to create and distribute political graphics and posters that amplified the voices of the most impacted communities working in social justice organizations. We wanted to sustain the tradition of intersecting graphics and organizing, which has a history of more than hundred years in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. We learned from the collective Taller models that came before us about how to bring a handmade process of printmaking to community as a different way to engage and share stories. We were determined to refine a methodology that would work for the new millennium by introducing new forms and utilizing platforms that our elders might have never imagined would exist, such as the Internet and social media. We were determined, as Juan R. Fuentes, a veterano of this work, has eloquently stated, “to use every tool possible in the fight for our collective liberation.”

On August 26, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire after seven weeks of fighting. Thankfully, Operation Protective Edge has ended, or at least is in remission. Last month, my post, “The Gaza War—Through the Eyes of Israeli Illustrators and Art Directors” took a look at the conflict from the point of view of four Israeli artists who have been participating in Guy Morag’s International Plain Notebook Project and made notebooks in July and August. Their work is reminiscent of the “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things” poster created in 1966 by Another Mother for Peace in response to the Vietnam War.
On the Palestinian side, the view was and is significantly different. Instead of visual odes to peace, war protests, and images of life inconvenienced and interrupted by air-aid sirens and trips to shelters, there is stark anger and enmity—in the colors of the Palestinian flag.

The spectrum of styles and media has expanded to include graphic design and screen printing, as seen with Melanie Cervantes’s and Jesus Barraza’s bold, one-dimensional posters lining the corridor leading into the main exhibition.
When Ms. Cervantes, 37, first connected with Chicano art, she said the thrust of the social movement was over, but was still being fought. “It was an unfinished struggle,” she said. “We needed to protect and continue those gains.”
Though Chicano art has been shown in formal exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the Pompidou Center in Paris, Ms. Cervantes said it was “emotional” nonetheless to see their work honored in a museum in France.
Ms. Cervantes bases some of her work on cultural elements like the Day of the Dead, the Mexican interpretation of All Souls’ Day. But her work also includes social messages about women’s rights and the Arab Spring protests.